Awe

Today a new science of embodiment with roots in William James’s thinking reveals that many of your most significant thoughts have correlates in bodily responses. Your perception of risk, for example, tracks shifts in your systolic blood pressure, when the heart’s quarter-second contraction sends waves of blood through your arteries. How we hold our bodies shapes the reality we perceive. It is easier to recognize concepts (e.g., “vomit”) when you move your facial muscles into the configuration of the related emotion (e.g., of disgust). Simply adopting the furrowed brow and tightened mouth of anger leads people to perceive life as more unfair (try glaring with clenched jaw while listening to a loved one and see what comes to mind). Your judgments about whether someone is trustworthy or not track sensations in your gut.

Claire Tolan’s experiences with ASMR are a poetic example of embodiment: her chills were accompanied by ideas of feeling close to her parents and being surrounded by a sense of home. This theme—that some kind of chills accompany the sense of joining with others to face the unknown—appears across history in descriptions of moments of awe and the wonders of life.

Within the arts, certain qualities of music can produce the chills, such as crescendos, high-pitched solos, expansive guitar riffs, fast drumming, and dissonant chords. The chills also arise when music brings us closer to others in a sense of shared identity.

When reading a novel or a poem, a “literary frisson”—the sudden chills in recognizing the vast forces of a plot—may ripple through our bodies. Here is Vladimir Nabokov on reading Charles Dickens’s novels: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.” As with music, the chills of literature unite us with others in grappling with the vast unknowns we face together.

We often experience the chills during epiphanies whose recognition joins us with others in common cause. At the coffee maker one day while reporting on the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein was overtaken by the chills. He turned to his colleague Bob Woodward and blurted out: “Oh my god, this president is going to be impeached.” Chills signal to our default mind that yet-to-be-recognized forces of social change are nearby—in this particular case, that the discoveries Bernstein and Woodward were unearthing would unite a movement to bring down a president.

Different kinds of chills occur with regularity in encounters with the Divine, as in this example from the book of Job:

In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face. The hair of my flesh stood up.

Within the Yogic tradition, the chills are a sign of devotional love, part of Kundalini, the feminine, ego-dissolving spiritual energy of mystical interconnectedness experienced during yoga. In the vein of Buddhist literature known as Abhidhamma, the bodily shiver is seen as a sign of ecstasy, of losing the self in relation to the Divine. If the soul is embodied, as Walt Whitman observed, the chills would seem to be one register of our recognition that we are connected to something primary, good, and larger than the self.

But what are we to make of the various meanings of “the chills”? That they accompany awe and terror? Bliss and dread? Ecstasy and horror? Union with the Divine and condemnation?

Inspired by questions like these, awe scientists have mapped the meanings of “the chills.” In one illustrative study, people wrote about an experience of the chills and then reported on the degree to which they felt four sensations—cold shivers, shudders, tingling, and goose bumps—as well as various emotions. This study would reveal that “the chills” can refer to two distinct bodily responses with very different embodied social meanings.

The first is a cold shiver and shudder—what I will refer to as cold shivers—which accompany feelings of horror and dread. Human depravity and baseness can trigger cold shivers, for example when reading about genocide, torture, cannibalism, or pedophilia. Cold shivers are accompanied by the sense of being alienated, alone, and separate from others. In mystical experiences involving cold shivers, the individual feels condemned by an omnipotent god, fearing an afterlife of solitary torment and isolation, reminiscent of Dante’s hell. Our more everyday experience of the eerie—when we feel a strange and unexpected emptiness in a familiar place—can trigger cold shivers.